Falu Bakrania was born in Mumbai, India, and grew up in Orange County, where, she says, she was called names just because she was born in a foreign country. She was ostracized, she says via e-mail, subjected to "racist/colonial stereotypes of South Asians being backward/primitive, conservative, close-minded, having strange rituals, etc."

In 1991, her cousins introduced her to Bhangra, a music genre with Punjabi lyrics as well as a mix of disco and synthesizers. The music came from a generation of South Asians living in England who "took on this British, Asian expression," Bakrania says.

She describes some of the lyrical content: "Some are nostalgia for the homeland and they're just about dancing and girls and partying and that kind of thing. Sometimes it could be nationalistic, and sometimes it's just to celebrate," says Bakrania, an associate professor of race and resistance studies at San Francisco State University.

"I was attracted to the cultural creativity and the political consciousness that was being subtly expressed in the music," she says. "Feeling isolated and out of place growing up in the U.S., it spoke to me."

Bakrania, 45, traveled to Britain in the mid-1990s as a graduate student in cultural anthropology to research the music and the politics and gender issues related to the British Asian music scene in London. Over her years of study, another South Asian music scene, called the Asian Underground, developed. The artists started to make a name for themselves and made it into mainstream British music magazines.

"It was a bigger deal," she says, "because it achieved industry success and it was basically South Asian electronica, drum 'n' bass."

She continues, "It made for a very interesting research agenda because now you had two very different music scenes both claiming to represent British Asian identities in some way - and there was conflict between them so it made for a lot of interesting questions: Who is this music representing? How is it representing these identities and some of the gender and class divides."

Bakrania turned her research into the book "Bhangra and Asian Underground: South Asian Music and the Politics of Belonging in Britain." She'll discuss the book Thursday night at the Booksmith.

The book delves into what it means to be a South Asian in Britain and how the culture of the two genres of South Asian music had their own conflicts within the music scene and minority culture. She examines issues of class, sexuality and gender, as well as notions of identity and how they all played into the music scene.

"South Asians are the largest minority group in Britain," she says. "They have experienced really intense racism."